The record in numbers

The dataset joins four public records of the 2017 event: Reddit's log of every pixel change, the table of the usernames behind its hashed names, the Place Atlas of the finished canvas, and the posts and comments of the subreddits behind its artworks. This page shows what each holds. Every figure is computed from the shared files; the data guide explains how to download and rebuild them.

Pixel changes

Reddit's log records the time, position, color and hashed account of every change: 16,559,897 changes by 1,166,924 accounts (Reddit, 2017). The canvas opened to the public on 31 March 2017 and froze on 3 April at 17:00 UTC: a little over 72 hours of placing from the first minute of public traffic, at 16:55 UTC. The study's window opens at 16:00, so its hours run from 0 to 73; the last pixel change came at 16:58:54. Activity rose and fell with the day: it dipped between about 04:00 and 12:00 UTC, and peaked in hour 51 at 401,442 changes.

Most accounts did little. The median account made 3 changes, and a third of all accounts (382,233) made just one. The most active account made 656; the five-minute timer allowed about 876 over the event. The top 10% of accounts made 60% of all changes, and the top 1% made 15%.

Artworks

The Place Atlas outlines 1,473 artworks on the finished canvas (Place Atlas, 2017). The median artwork covers 289 pixels, about 17 by 17; one in ten covers more than 1,763. The largest, Rainbow Road, covers 90,552 pixels, 9% of the canvas, and drew 1,130,384 changes. The Entire Dutch Area follows at 33,760 pixels. The median artwork drew 3,368 changes, or about 12 per pixel: most pixels were placed, overwritten and placed again.

Of the 1,473 artworks, 1,236 credit at least one subreddit. These credits are where the census of communities starts (how we came to 705).

Communities

The 705 communities in the census wrote 2,130,302 posts and comments from the opening to a day after the freeze, 1,590,890 of them while the canvas was open. Sizes span four orders of magnitude. The median community wrote 549 posts and comments while the canvas was open; r/leagueoflegends wrote 54,110, most of them about its game and not the canvas. The coders read every item and coded what concerned the event.

The week before the event shows who was already there. The median community had 276 distinct posters in those seven days. 78 communities have no record in the week before; most were founded for the event. New communities says what they were.

Writing and placing were done by different people. Across the 704 communities with an artwork region, a median of 11% of the changes inside the community's artworks came from accounts that posted in the community between the opening and seven days after the freeze. Most hands that built an artwork left no post in the community that claimed it. Regions overlap, so these shares are sound for each community but cannot be added across communities.

Sources

Every number on this page comes from pixel_record.npz and artworks_index.csv (the pixels-per-artwork build), MASTER-census.csv (the census) and the hourly pixel table pixels.csv with its week-before activity table. All are rebuilt by the collection scripts.

Place Atlas. (2017). atlas-2017 [Data set]. GitHub. https://github.com/placeAtlas/atlas-2017

Reddit. (2017). Place datasets [Data set]. r/redditdata.